A Fixian Mindset

A look back.... way back.

Well Kali has arrived now, and everybody has been going nuts with the new toys. As I'm writing this, CCP are working away at getting up a new patch on the server to institute some fixes and some changes. I haven't gone over the patch notes in great detail yet, so no comment there. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how smoothly Kali was put into place... I had a bet with two corpmates, on how long the delay would be beyond the alloted 24h's for CCP to get things up and running, we even had a rule in place saying that the server had to be up at least 45m in order for it to count. I overestimated how long it would take, I owe a T2 fitted cruiser to my buddy.

I'm getting astrometics finally trained up to L5 so I can take advantage of those new probes, and get in on some of the exploration. I've always been a huge fan of exploring, and I have fond memories going back over 3 years past of ripping around in a Tristan and checking out the sights, and seeing 'what could happen?'. If I had more time to myself, I know I'd still be doing the same thing today. It was on one of those trips three years ago, that I had undocked in a Tristan from our home in Stacmon, Placid region, that I found myself first flying through Syndicate, and then through Arridia, and finally I ended up in a region I had never been before, Khanid.

Up until that point, I had been as far west and as far north as you can get; when setting out my intention was basically to check out the south a little. As I started flying towards the higher security system of the region, I bumped into a few guys on the way that hailed me in local. We got to chatting and things took an interesting unexpected turn. They started to tell me about something called the CFS. I'm obviously going 'what's that?'... well it seems that the CFS was so new, that there was some disagreement in local over exactly wether the 'C' stood for Coalition or Confederation, but the short of it was that there was a new alliance starting up.

Apparently it was very hush hush sort of stuff... however they seemed to think that didn't include telling the new guy in local all about it. Well the guys I was talking with got some intel that a pirate in the area was causing some trouble, and before they took off, they decided to ask me if I'd be interested in coming along? Well this is the sort of thing that made my roadtrips worthwhile in those days... new things to do, places to see, and people to shoot; so off we went.

Little did I know, but my trusty little Tristan would actually come in handy that day. Not due to my skills in pvp (near non-existant at the time), nor due to a superior setup I had fitted (it was probably ass), but it turned out that I had read a guide on scanning by a guy named Kalshrinth (sic? known as the Loremaster, this guy had a number of guides out, and was a pretty famous figure back in the day) not that long ago, and it was something I was pretty good at.... and it was also something the rest of these guys didn't have the first clue about. Next thing I knew, I was in-system in a CFS gang, and nobody could seem to narrow down where exactly this pirate was. I volunteered my services.

Getting out my trusty scanner, I warped to the sun and did a full range 360 scan... nothing... 1 planet was out of range, so I warped there and did it again, sure enough, the guy was in range. Pulling up the range of the furthest moon I cut my scan distance to half of that and scanned again, basically narrowing him down. With a few quick rinse and repeats, and a quick directional scan to verify, I had the pirate narrowed down to being around a moon. Off we all went and charged in there guns blazing ready to take him down. Well it turns out the pirate wasn't exactly stupid, he was aligned and got out of there the second we came in. Over the course of the next hour though, I got a lot of practice in with my scanner, including busting a safespot the guy had made. Never did catch the guy, but I throughly enjoyed working as a team with these guys, and in return I found that they had really appreciated having me along. A week later, my 6 man corp joined the CFS on invitation.

Now, reading over the above, it's not exactly thrilling stuff here. In fact, taking over an hour to chase after 1 guy in system would be considered a bit nuts. But this is only about 3 months after launch, everything was new... and the vast majority of us could definately fall into the category of 'noob'. We weren't even using voice com's for any of this stuff, everything we did was typed out in the gang chat, I didn't even know what Ventrillo or Teamspeak was back in those days. We all just kind of flew around pell mell all gung-ho trying to blast whatever we managed to actually target. Obviously... I wasn't one of the trailblazers of pvp, you can see that easily enough from the above. I learned early on that my more natural skills were in other areas, for the most part that happened to be diplomacy, and I got my first taste of that about two weeks into launch.

I think it's worth realising that Eve had something of a different feel for me back in those early days, likely for all of us. I was an empire nub, flying around an Imicus with a couple of mining lasers, looking for a nice juicy roid to sink my teeth into. Back then, you could actually find ore right up to Arkanor in empire. Imperium Technologies was a production corporation, I'd go out in my Imicus, and then ninja mine like crazy to get 20 loads of ore for a single refine of something like Bistot; I'd refine that, then take the minerals home to hand over to my C0-CEO, who would throw that into Tristan production. We had a decent thing going in Placid, we had either squeezed out all the competition or made cartel agreements with them; we even wardec'd one corp that didn't cooperate.... Oh YA baby! Market PVP! BOOYAH!

So one day, I was out again in my little frigate, and happily mining away, warping from belt to belt as rats came in. Those little rats could be pretty nasty, they practically instalocked and opened up on you without delay, so you had to be on the ball. I was cycling through the belts, and warped in to find that the system had some new visitors. Quite suddenly, I found myself faced with about 12-15 other frigates, and 2 Moa's. I mean... holy shit... Moa's! That stuff was friggin pricey man! This is like cutting edge firepower here, I had previously seen a few people in tier 1 cruisers, but this stuff was top of the line.... and they were locking me as they approached. I honestly can't remember the name of their corp anymore, all I remember is that they were all from Iceland... I recall wondering to myself if perhaps some of them might be dev's, they sure were well organized, and way ahead of the average curve.

I looked up their info quick as they approached me, none too friendly like, and realised that this was a huge corp, there were over 50 guys in it.... 50! I get a convo from one of them 'Get out of the belt, or we'll kill your ship'. I'm thinking to myself, hey I was here first, minding my own business... what the fuck gives you the right to kick me out of this belt? Sure enough, that's what I told them as well. For some reason, it turns out that two cruisers with their guns locked on my tin can of a ship was considered by them to be what gave them the right to claim the belt. Now, I can't remember exactly what was said, but what I do remember was that I argued with them for a good 10 minutes or so, all the time, waiting for them to open up on my sorry ass with those cruisers. I mean, this was actually risky business for me, that Imicus cost 350k, that would be a fair setback to lose it. Well I left the belt and started work again in the remaining 5... I wasn't going to win the arguement at that point.

So I'm back to work, carrying a bit of a grudge however. 1 less belt means less places to mine where there weren't rats, that increases the amount of time it will be for me to make my cash. I warp into one of the belts..... and there they were again!!! They had completely mined out the first belt, and were working on the next one. I sit there watching them, and think to myself 'fuck this', at this rate, the area I'll be able to mine in is going to keep decreasing until I have nothing to work with, only 4 belts open to me now means wait times for rats to leave, if I lose one more belt, this system is going to be a bust for me.

The Moa's lock me, and start to approach. Nope... I'm not budging, fuck that, time to win one for the little guy..... or get blown up and later realise that arguing the right of way as a pedestrian while a truck bears down on you is a really stupid idea. They convo me again, they want to know if I have shit for brains. Now, they knew I was upset the last time, this time I explained just what their operation meant for my own activity, and they were pissing me right off as they continued to narrow down where I could work, I think I might have compared them to a swarm of locusts at the time. 'Warp out or we'll waste you're ship, last chance'. I'm pissed, very pissed. 'Fuck it asshole, go ahead and shoot me ya prick! I'm a small corp now, but give me a couple months and we'll see how well this turns out for you in the longrun! I need to mine, you go ahead and decide if you want to shoot or not'.

There is a long pause.

'Ok listen man... don't say anything to the other guys, but go ahead and mine beside us, we'll take care of any rats that spawn'. After that, they were totally cool.

Oh sweet victory. It was the dawning realization that many matters could be solved by approaching things from the right angle, that the pen did have a place amongest the many swords of Eve. I've been in alliance level politics for a long time now, I sincerely do wonder what it would be like again being an independant empire corp these days, and what sort of encounters people have every day. In some ways, I think I'd find that there is a lot that hasn't changed, especially from my encounters with the Alachene Guard - unorganized, gung-ho, no hindsight... it's a sharp reminder of what the CFS used to be like. Amazingly enough, my first blog entry, which revolved around these guys, wasn't the final encounter. Many of my corpmates got the opportunity to finally get a taste of dealing with them. They are 50 corps strong now, and all my guys could say was 'wow... just wow'. It turns out, the CFS has been reborn, and it's in Alachene.

No idea if anyone will enjoy this latest entry, but that's the nice thing about blogs, I write it for myself.

posted by Avernus @ 6:16 AM